Calvin Prof Gets Federal Grant

A Calvin College professor of education has received a $50,000 planning grant from two federal agencies in the United States to support her work in developing reading programs in schools in Sierra Leone, Africa.

Jo Kuyvenhoven, associate professor of education at Calvin in Grand Rapids, Mich., received the grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Higher Education for Development (HED). The grant will fund a collaborative planning initiative with Milton Margai College in Sierra Leone to develop a reading syllabus to be implemented in primary schools in that country.

“The grant enables me and my colleagues in Sierra Leone to take, what I think, is the most effective step for substantially affecting the success of teaching children to read. We’ll be working to develop a syllabus for the teaching of reading to be used in Sierra Leone teacher training colleges,” says Kuyvenhoven.

Two years ago, she says, she started a pilot study with the help of teachers at a newly established Christian school in Kabala. When she tested the children after one year at the school, the results indicated a significant difference in reading ability between the children involved in her program and those students whose teachers didn’t use the new methods to teach reading.

Paul Kortenhoven, who served for many years as a missionary in Sierra Leone for Christian Reformed World Missions, says he strongly supports the work that Kuyvenhoven is doing. “It is a wonderful program and the church should know about it,” he says.

Materials used in the classroom were largely folk tales with which many of the children could relate. Kuyvenhoven has collected stories over the years from various sources, including her own trips to Sierra Leone, and published a book of the stories. The work in the Kabala Christian School and teacher training workshops have all been part of developing a foundation and rationale for this project.

“They’ve shown us what kinds of things work in the teaching of reading. We’ll apply what we’ve learned and done to our thinking about teacher training,” she says.

While Kuyvenhoven is happy to get the grant, she is especially pleased that it will help her and her colleagues in Sierra Leone to improve the literacy rate for children in the African country had been racked for many years by bloody civil war.

When her colleagues in Sierra Leone learned on the grant, she says that her “co-director, Aske Gbla, said ‘Glory be to God’ almost a dozen times when I told him. Another partner, Dr. J. Abdul Kargbo, said, ‘They had mercy on a country where education is in tatters.’”

Funded by a cooperative agreement with USAID, HED was founded by the six major U.S. higher education associations to engage U.S. colleges and universities in international development. For more information about HED and to view details about the planning grants competition, visit www.HEDprogram.com.

Contact Johanna Kuyvenhoven at 616.526.7629; or email [email protected] for more information about the program.